Youth Challenges eBook

“Yes, indeed—­but a girl! It
has been the custom for the members of the firm to
employ only men.”

Bonbright looked steadily at Rangar a moment, then
said:

“Please have that girl notified at once that
she is to be my secretary.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rangar. The boy
was going to prove difficult. He owned a
will. Well, thought the man, others may have had
it in the family before—­but it has not
remained long.

“Anything more, Mr. Foote?”

“Thank you, no,” said Bonbright, and Rangar
said good evening and disappeared.

The boy rested his chin on his hand again, and reflected
gloomily. He hunched up his shoulders and sighed.
“Anyhow,” he said to himself, “I’ll
have somebody around me who is human.”

CHAPTER II

Bonbright’s father had left the office an hour
before he and Rangar had finished their tour of the
works. It was always his custom to leave his
business early and to retire to the library in his
home, where daily he devoted two hours to adding to
the manuscript of The Philosophical Biography of Marquis
Lafayette. This work was ultimately to appear
in several severe volumes and was being written, not
so much to enlighten the world upon the details of
the career of the marquis as it was to utilize the
marquis as a clotheshorse to be dressed in Bonbright
Foote VI’s mature reflections on men, events,
and humanity at large.

Bonbright VII sat at his desk motionless, studying
his career as it lay circumscribed before him.
He did not study it rebelliously, for as yet rebellion
had not occurred to him. The idea that he might
assert his individuality and depart from the family
pattern had not ventured to show its face. For
too many years had his ancestors been impressing him
with his duty to the family traditions. He merely
studied it, as one who has no fancy for geometry will
study geometry, because it cannot be helped.
The path was there, carefully staked out and bordered;
to-day his feet had been placed on it, and now he must
walk. As he sat he looked ahead for bypaths—­none
were visible.

The shutting-down whistle aroused him. He walked
out through the rapidly emptying office to the street,
and there he stood, interested by the spectacle of
the army that poured out of the employees’ entrances.
It was an inundation of men, flooding street from sidewalk
to sidewalk. It jostled and joked and scuffled,
sweating, grimy, each unit of it eager to board waiting,
overcrowded street cars, where acute discomfort would
be suffered until distant destinations were reached.
Somehow the sight of that surging, tossing stream of
humanity impressed Bonbright with the magnitude of
Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, even more than the
circuit of the immense plant had done.

Five thousand men, in a newspaper paragraph, do not
affect the imagination. Five thousand men in
the concrete are quite another matter, especially
if you suddenly realize that each of them has a wife,
probably children, and that the whole are dependent
upon the dynasty of which you are a member for their
daily bread.